Note 1 — EPILOGUE

I can imagine some of my readers objecting here that, whereas I have so rudely assailed the method of interpretation of New Testament documents adopted by the Nihilistic school—I only use this name as a convenient label for those who deny the historical reality of Jesus Christ—I nevertheless propound no rival method of my own. The truth is there is no abstract method of using documents relating to the past, and you cannot in advance lay down rules for doing so. You can only learn how to deal with them by practice, and it is one of the chief functions of any university or place of higher education to imbue students with historical method by setting before them the original documents, and inspiring them to extract from them whatever solid results they can. A hundred years ago the better men in the college of Christchurch at Oxford were so trained by the dean, Cyril Jackson, who would set them the task of “preparing for examination the whole of Livy and Polybius, thoroughly read and studied in all their comparative bearings.”1 No better curriculum, indeed, could be devised for strengthening and developing the faculty of historical judgment; and the schools of Literae Humaniores and Modern History, which were subsequently established at Oxford, carried on the tradition of this enlightened educationalist. In them the student is brought face to face in the original dialects with the records of the past, and stimulated to “read and study them in their comparative bearings.” One single branch of learning, however, has been treated apart in the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, and pursued along the lines of tradition and authority—I mean the study of Christian antiquities. The result has been deplorable. Intellectually-minded Englishmen have turned away from this field of history as from something tainted, and barely one of our great historians in a century deems it worthy of his notice. It has been left to parsons, to men who have never learned to swim, because they have never had enough courage to venture into deep water. As we sow, so we reap. The English Church is probably the most enlightened of the many sects that make up Christendom. Yet what is the treatment which it accords to any member of itself who has the courage to dissociate himself from the “orthodoxy” of the fourth century, of those Greek Fathers (so-called) in whom the human intelligence sank to the nadir of fanaticism and futility? An example was recently seen in the case of the Rev. Mr. W. H. Thompson, a young theological tutor of Magdalen College in Oxford, who, animated by nothing but loyalty for the Church, recently liberated his soul about the miracles of the Gospels in a thoroughly scholarly book entitled Miracles in the New Testament. The attitude of the clergy in general towards a work of genuine research, which sets truth above traditional orthodoxy, was revealed in a conference of the clergy of the southern province, held soon after its publication on May 19, 1911. The following account of that meeting is taken from the Guardian of May 26, 1911:—